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She felt his wrist relax as she saw the rage darken the brilliance of his gaze as it locked with hers. A muscle pounded heavily at his jaw as his lips flattened, his eyes flicking over her shoulder as Mike groaned heavily. The sound of Mike collapsing in the car was easily heard in the silence of the parking lot.
“Rory said the apartment over the garage was available.” His voice was guttural, low. “I’ll store my gear and finish this bastard’s truck myself or I can kill him now. Your choice.”
And he meant it.
Sabella shook her head in confusion as the BMW started up behind her, the tires screaming on its exit from the lot.
“Why?” she finally whispered, her voice hoarse as she tried to make sense of it all. Why this, why now? Why had fate thrown someone in her path guaranteed to destroy her, just when she was finally rebuilding her life?
“Choose.”
She released his wrist, realizing she was still gripping it with a strength she hadn’t known she was capable of.
Finger by finger, she forced herself to let him go. She couldn’t answer him, she couldn’t choose, but when she got her hands on Rory she was going to kill him.
Ignoring the shocked and surprised faces around her, she turned and moved slowly back to the garage. She had a job to do, she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, let this interfere.
She didn’t need this.
She sat back down on the creeper and let it roll her back beneath the car she had been working on. A few more little tweaks and it should be finished. Just a little bit more.
She picked up the wrench on the cement floor beside her and went to work. If tears rolled from the corners of her eyes and into her hair, then she ignored them. If
the pain tightened her chest until it felt as though her heart were being ripped apart, then she ignored it.
Today, there was work to be done. When everyone else was gone, she’d pay Noah Blake for the day and send him on his way. It would hurt. She needed the money and the bank payment was due next week. If she had to, if there was no other choice, then she would sell some more of the jewelry her mother had left her to cover the rest of the payment.
One thing was for sure. Noah was going to have to go. She couldn’t handle this. She couldn’t handle her instant response to him, and she couldn’t handle the conflicting emotions that raged through her at the sight of him. There was something familiar and yet something too dangerous about him for her to get a handle on. Something about him that had made her feel again. Something more than the regret she had resigned herself to three years before. She had finished grieving three years ago; sometimes, now, she just regretted.
She didn’t notice the sob that tore from her chest at the thought, but the man standing by the car heard it. Heard it, and hated it.
Noah could still feel the rage coursing through him, burning through his mind like a haze of red. The sight of Mike, the sound of him, the vicious words that had poured from his lips when he spoke to Sabella. Noah had lost his mind. Even now, he wanted the other man dead. A lifetime of history, of friendship, was over that quickly. As far Noah was concerned, Mike was living on borrowed time.
He glanced down at the ground, and the sight of Sabella’s legs bent, feet braced on the floor, knees raised against the fender of the car, sent another sort of fury surging through him.
She had no business under there. No matter how damned sexy she looked with her jeans stained with oil and a smear of it on her chin and her cheek.
She was killing herself. Noah hadn’t missed the dark circles under her eyes, the weight she had lost, the haunted depths of her misty gray eyes. This wasn’t the woman he had left behind. There was no makeup on her surprisingly youthful face, her once honey-streaked light blond hair was a mix of burnished golds and dark blond now. He hadn’t even known she colored it. How had he not known that his wife dyed her hair?
He brought to mind the memory of her naked body. How he had loved her body, curvy and warm, fitting against him perfectly. The bare soft flesh between her thighs had been devoid of curls, so he’d had no idea what the natural color should be.
And God, she looked young. The makeup she had worn had made her look older, more experienced. He knew she had been eighteen when they married, and he was suddenly desperately aware of how young she had really been.
At twenty-six, she still looked like a kid without the shield of cosmetics to add maturity to her still unlined face. But the grief was there. It was thick and dark in her eyes, in the tightly controlled line of her lips, the stiff set of her shoulders before she disappeared beneath the car.
He drew in a deep hard breath as the mechanics stared back at him, watching him as Sabella disappeared beneath the car. Their expressions were wary, part relief, part concern. They weren’t the same men who had worked here when he left, they were unknowns and unknowns were always the enemy. And he would never forget that only one, the youngest, had stepped forward to protect Sabella while the others stood back.
“She’s not alone anymore,” he growled, knowing the fury that roughened his voice now. “Get your asses in there and finish the work now, or get your stuff and get out. I want every vehicle in that damned bay finished before any of you go home tonight, or the only one I want to see in the morning is this one.” He stabbed his finger imperiously toward Toby. “And your ass belongs in the office, if I’m not mistaken.”
Toby swallowed tightly, his brown eyes flickering in indecision toward the garage where Sabella had disappeared. It was obvious he was more concerned about leaving her undefended than he was about his job.
“Go, boy,” he snarled. “We’ll discuss details later.” His gaze swung to the other men, watching as they shifted nervously, their oil-streaked expressions and wary eyes staying trained on him.
“Make your choice now,” he snapped. “And make sure you make the right one.”
He didn’t wait for their decisions. He made for the garage, striding straight to the line of clipboards on the workstation and grabbing the first one. It was time to get to work.
He wasn’t fooling himself; after the others had left, Sabella would let that temper he knew she had, erupt. He’d only seen it once before in their marriage. The day he had made the mistake of telling her she couldn’t do something. She had taught him fast and hard exactly what happened when he tried to control her.
